Having just finished Rage last night I’ll add a few other gripes:

1) Anemic storyline using only the most road-worn sci-fi cliches. Who is The Authority? Is there anyone in charge? Can we meet and kill him/her please? Does anyone care?

2) Perhaps the most disappointing final mission and “ending” in recent memory. After painstakingly crafting an apocalyptic landscape they reward you at the end by sending you down the most generic series of space ship corridors to flip a few switches and save the world. Even the BFG they set you up with for the final mission is a snoozer.

3) The world seems vast at first but it’s a shell game – it’s actually pretty small and formulaic. There’s essentially two sections to Rage – Wellspring and Subway Town (damn that’s creative).  Neither location is that memorable (Subway Town is particularly small) and they have the exact same features (there’s the pub with the horrifically broken 5-Finger Filet game and mildly entertaining card game, the racetrack, the garage, the shop and the job board).  Each town is surrounded by wasteland but there’s not much reward for wandering and you’ll engage in boring car battles with bandits in the same areas each time. The Mutant Bash TV or whatever is pretty fun the first time but it’s not randomized and thus not worth playing more than a few times.

4) Side-quests are usually pretty pointless. They even artificially extend game content by giving you the same mission twice! One of the subway town residents has you go to his distillery and fill some jugs while mutants attack you. Later you check the job board and are asked to return to the same location and…fill some jugs while mutants attack you. You won’t collect anything on these missions besides some ammo, cash (which at this point you probably won’t need) and a few cards for that game in town you probably won’t play.

“It has been 7 years since the last release from id, and the shooter genre has moved on.”

How can you make this statement without addressing the myriad ways in which Rage fails to meet current standards of FPS game design? There are so many areas where Rage creates problems that developers solved ages ago. The inventory system is clunky. Switching weapons/ammo in the heat of battle is awkward and results in taking unnecessary damage. If you want a weapon that isn’t in your 4 “quick” slots you have to pause the game, tab over to the weapons page, scroll down, assign a new weapon, then return to the action and use the bumper/analog sticks to select it.  In 2011 it’s just sad to see a shooter from id that is this clunky.

It’s also hard to justify not mentioning the terrible save feature. FPS veterans have long ago adapted to the current standard of autosaves/checkpoints. I can’t remember the last time I had to manually save this much in a FPS, but I think it was sometime in 1998. I typically overwrite saves unless there is a specific reason to create multiples. In Rage this takes no less than 7 button presses, maybe more depending on which save you overwrite. Since you stand to lose lots of progress if you don’t save often you’ll constantly be leaving the action. While I’m on the subject, why does Rage allow so many save slots? There’s virtually no player input in character building (besides the laughable 3 costume “class” system) and only one linear path to completing any task. This ain’t Skyrim, people.

Rage is definitely a visual powerhouse and deserves kudos for creating an interesting world.  After a few hours though I did start to see the visuals as more of a matte painting – gorgeous to look at but in no way interactive. The world also starts to feel pretty small and predictable after the fourth or fifth trip down the same paths.  With few exceptions the bandit encounters occurred in the exact same spot, which just gets tedious given the amount of back and forth fetch quests. On several occasions you complete a quest, return for the reward, and then get sent immediately back to the same area.

Rage is fun to play but giving this 95/100 and saying it’s near perfect is crazy. The three cons you listed are very minor in light of all the other deficiencies. Having played FPSs for almost 20 years, it’s difficult to play Rage without seeing mostly antiquated mechanics and missed opportunities.